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Executive Summary

Today the Mobile Internet is making its first tentative steps towards mass adoption as new high-speed mobile infrastructure and enhanced mobile portals offer end-users a more compelling online experience offering improved value-for-money. It is predicted that by 2005 more than 55 million Europeans will be regular mobile portal users. However, the road-ahead is one littered with obstacles and pitfalls, challenges that must be overcome and opportunities that must be seized, if the Mobile Internet is to become a profitable and pervasive part of everyday life and business.

The Usability Analysis of European Mobile Internet Portals takes an in-depth look at a key challenge for the Mobile Internet going forward, namely portal usability. To date mobile portals have been characterized by their poor usability and the limited online experience offered to end-users. Many factors have been responsible ? unreliable early handsets, limited content, slow connections, and poor portal navigation. Today, the first 3 of these issues have been largely solved (by improved handsets, better content and high-speed infrastructure) but portal navigation remains a problem, with users routinely expected to make perhaps 20-25 ?clicks? on their mobile handset in order to locate content, thus greatly limiting their ability to easily locate, and benefit from, wireless content.

Given the recent improvements in content and infrastructure, the core remaining usability problem is that, users need to spend a significant time navigating to content through a series of hierarchical menus. That this frustrates users should be clear. But the fact that mobile operators often charge users for their navigation time (as well as their content time) simply adds insult to injury. Recent studies highlight the scale of this problem and the gross mismatch between user expectations and mobile Internet realities. A recent study claims that while the average user expects to be able to access content within 30 seconds, the reality is closer to 150 seconds. The result: today mobile portals offers users poor value-for-money.

This report, for the first time, focuses on a comprehensive analysis of portal usability from a navigation perspective. It introduces a number of key portal usability and navigation metrics as a means of evaluating the usability of a given mobile portal. In particular, the report introduces the click-distance model of navigation effort, which makes it possible to evaluate the degree of effort that a user is required to invest in any given mobile portal in order to locate and access a given content service.

The report includes a comprehensive usability analysis of 19 European mobile portals (including mobile operator and independent portals) from regions including, Germany, France, the UK, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Denmark, Italy, and the Czech Republic. This analysis highlights key usability problems that exist with the current generation of mobile portals, and their implications in terms of expected usage and user satisfaction. In addition the report describes a number of strategies for overcoming these problems in order to provide mobile users with a greatly enhanced online experience.

Key Usability Results

The report includes provides vital information on key usability factors across all portal analyzed, including:

• A detailed portal structure analysis focusing on the match/mismatch between portal structure and mobile handset capability.
• A detailed click-distance analysis documenting how many ?clicks? a user is typically faced with in order to locate relevant content.
• From the analysis the following portals were found to be the leading benchmarks;

• Sonera (Finland) [10.44, 109]
• T-Motion (UK) [11.80, 107]
• O2 (UK) [13.54, 98]
• Vodafone (Ireland) [14.33, 145]
• Genion - O2 (Germany) [14.55, 137]

• A detailed navigation-time analysis documenting how long users take navigating to content the portals analyzed.
• A detailed analysis, portal by portal, of how many content sites are sufficiently easy for users to access to promote regular and high-volume usage.
• The average portal has a click-distance 40% above the maximum recommended level of 12.
• Approximately 65% of content is placed too far away from the portal homepage to encourage usage.
• Based on click-distance analysis over 20% of user sessions end in failed session.
• Portal usability directly affects ARPU and if managed correctly can be used to improve ARPU by up to 20%.
• A detailed analysis, portal by portal, of how usability and navigation problems can lead to failed sessions, sessions where users fail to locate any relevant content.

In addition the report describes how portal operators can better design and structure their mobile portals so as to offer users a greatly improved online experience, focusing in particular on:

• Optimal strategies for the design of high-value, high-volume mobile portals.
• Strategies for adapting existing portals for greater usability without the need for additional IT investment.
• Strategies for releasing the true value of existing content services by positioning services within a portal structure for high-volume and regular-usage access.
• Two design philosophies are found to account for 70% of portals, deep and narrow versus shallow and wide. The alternative is for a portal to be deep and wide - which is shown to be a very difficult design to manage from a usability perspective and thus usage.
• Since most Operator portals are deep and wide they have increased difficulty in managing the usability of their portals. This reduces the success rate for portal usage for operators ? an issue that portal usability management can address.

Portal Personalization

In addition the report provides an assessment of next-generation mobile personalization technology in terms of its ability to effectively solve the navigation and usability problem.

• An account of the reality of next-generation personalization technologies and their application to the Mobile Internet.
• How advanced personalization technologies can solve the usability problem by automatically personalizing the navigation structure of a mobile portal in response to the learned preferences of an individual user.
• The business case for portal personalization, including the real ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) benefits for mobile operators.